Clinton’s wonky policies of fine-grained complexity contrast with rivals’ grandiose ideas
Hillary Clinton’s official campaign platform is now twice as long as “Hamlet”: seventy-three thousand six hundred forty-five words of policy ideas. One hundred seventy-four pages. And growing.
But, at its heart, this wordy list amounts to a statement of Clinton’s confidence in two things.
The status quo.
And the federal bureaucracy.
The other two candidates left in this presidential race want to overhaul American government. Clinton mainly wants to tinker with its parts. In many cases, her plans involve adding small — but intricate — new tasks for the bureaucracy, designed to make government smarter, more generous and more just.
To crack down on Wall Street, for instance, Clinton would expand a particular regulatory form. The form already is 42 pages long and can require up to 300 hours to fill out.
If Congress doesn’t overhaul immigration, Clinton’s plan is to allow undocumented residents to walk into local federal offices and ask for help. Already-busy bureaucrats — armed with guidelines that nobody has written yet — would make millions of new decisions about who can stay.
This approach says a lot about Clinton’s worldview, after 23 years in and around Washington.
To her, complexity is realism.
Clinton says she simply can’t make the simple, grand promises of her rivals — free college tuition, a big, beautiful, free wall. Instead, she skips ahead to what policy looks like the way it’s actually been done: complicated, ugly and in small steps.
“It’s all incremental. It’s a lot of small ball,” said Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute. “But it’s incrementally increasing the size and cost of government. It’s all in one direction.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clintons-wonky-policies-of-fine-grained-complexity-contrast-with-rivals-grandiose-ideas/2016/05/08/7a6f4b66-10a3-11e6-93ae-50921721165d_story.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_rainbow
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